Credulous punters' desire to get their hands on Google's new Project Glass head-mounted display is already being used against them by cyberscammers.
The Chocolate Factory's augmented reality glasses may be still at the prototype stage, but cybercrooks have latched onto the recent release of a demo video with their own cyber- …

bah

Re: bah

that £498 phone bill iv just paid was in vein then ??

Only if you injected it. With the "iv" you talked about, no doubt. I've heard of people going to desperate lengths to get high (Zappa smoking a high school diploma being one), but you've officially taken the biscuit.

"...users should be cautious about implausibly generous offers"

A novel idea

I feel that Google Glass has terrific potential. You could feed your glasses prescription into them and have a bluetooth based sensor that sends your current blood/alcohol ratio to them too. Then your Google Glass recalibrates itself so that no matter how drunk you are, your vision is not impaired. That way, the cute boy or girl you hook up with at the end of a session remains cute when you wake up next to them the following morning.

re: Anyone stupid enough to fall for this kind of thing should be permanently barred from using the net.

You know, you've just given me an idea for a scam: the "internet driving license inspector" would get the mark to do a test on their computer knowledge and then let themselves be "bribed" into filing a "pass" report when they inevitably fail. Savvy internet users would be filtered out by being able to pass the test, so you'd have fewer smart-asses wasting your time.

Not that I'm condoning this kind of thing, of course, but being able to think like a scammer probably affords some protection from them.

Groan

You tell them it's a scam, and how these scams work. They're smiling, nodding away - but you can read their minds through their glazed-over eyes... 'yeah yeah, but WHAT IF THIS TIME IT'S REAL'. Give up, you'll never win.

'Free shit' will always be dangerous opiate, capable of levering out any semblance of critical thinking in all but the most discriminate. It's the ultimate con because the outlay and investment is nothing - slathering greed is hardcoded into a frightening percentage of people.

In this case, I'd wager a bet that most of the average support user support base will never have heard of Google Glass, let alone know if they would want it.

Re: Groan

You're right, there's no telling 'em. Not so long ago a recently-divorced friend of my wife's was following the Internet dating sites.

Wife's friend: "I've found this great bloke! He's a sergeant in the US army!"

Me: "It's a scam."

WF: "No we chat regularly and get on really well."

Me: "It's a scam."

WF: "He's in Iraq at the moment."

Me: FFS! It's a ruddy scam and one that's as old as the sodding hills to boot. You watch, he'll be asking for money for a ticket to come and see you soon and when that happens, ask yourself how likely it is that US military personnel are a) skint and b) forced to make their own travel arrangements?".

WF: "You really are a bloody cynic aren't you? I'll show you........"

Several weeks later:

Wife's friend, now in tears: "It was a scaaaaammmmmm.....I can't believe I felllllll for iiiiitttttttt....."

I didn't even try to make my saving throw vs lack of sympathy, the negative factors were just way too high.

Shrug: the offer's as good as the survey results

Surveys are notoriously unreliable. People either try to guess the "right" answers, respond according to what they think the surveyor wants, don't understand the questions or have a "none of the above" reply.

So if people are getting suckered in to filling out surveys with implausibly generous bait being offered, then it appears that both sides of the understanding (what the punter says and what rewards they are offered) are equally bogus. At last the world of customer surveys are found an equilibrium point!

No such thing as a free lunch

I'm not convinced that I'd want them even if it were free. Funnelling ALL my personal information to Google is just not the future of my computing...can't speak for the rest of humanity. A HUD would definitely be useful; but I'm going to wait until it's thoroughly rooted and user-controllable.

2004 film The Final Cut

Bit of a thought provoking one where Robin Williams plays a 'cutter', someone who takes people's recorded history (through memory implants that are implanted at birth) when they die and makes a video memorial for their loved ones from the dead person's perspective.